Cinderella in a Dragster (1976)
Lacy drove onto the Dominguez Hills State College campus in a dragster, dressed in a helmet and yellow jumpsuit. Outside, near the college library, the audience listened as she delivered a rapid-fire autobiographical monologue on time and movement across space. Beginning with her childhood in Wasco, where she calculated the number of blocks she traversed weekly, her movement across space grew exponentially until the present, when she moved up and down the length of the state each week, teaching one day in San Francisco, one in Los Angeles, and one in San Diego. She calculated the time she spent each year in travel and the time spent shaving her legs, among other things. She talked about how being an artist was like being Cinderella, building castles in the air and making coaches out of pumpkins, and how survival as an artist requires an ability to build, then destroy, your own imaginaries in a search for the next metaphor. As she talked she casually put her foot up on the car door, revealing a glass slipper. At the end of the monologue, she tossed the slipper out of the dragster and drove off.
Documentation of Cinderella in a Dragster was featured in several publications, including the cover of High Performance magazine and Criss- Cross, Double-Cross, a single-issue magazine created by Paul McCarthy to document the work of artists living in Los Angeles at the time.
Dominguez Hills State College, Carson, California.